The water-flushed toilet is one of the most significant improvements of sanitation in human history. With its proliferation, propagation of many diseases was curbed commensurately. Before the water-flushed toilet, common practice was simply to dispose liquid waste into the immediately available streets, where it would accumulate or flow into the immediately adjacent water resources. Since its use became widespread, the water-flushed toilet provided an avenue for waste to be moved to locations remote to human population centers.
However, in terms of advancing the objective of healthy home use, there remain areas that are begging for improvement. One is furthering sanitary handling of the toilet seat which sits directly over the bowl. The proximity of waste, and regular replacement of a volume of waste with fresh water creates an inviting environment for fostering bacteria colonies. Once present, each flush sends some water droplets out of the bowl and make contact with other parts of the toilet, particularly the toilet seat. Very forceful flushing, as is common in many rapid-volume flush toilets, is even more likely to send large volumes of waste-carrying droplets into the air, to deposit on the seat, and especially if the seat is not raised.
An area of the seat which is most immediately affected is the underside of the seat, which accumulates deposits earlier than the top side of the seat. Because the bottom side is negatively affected before the top, there is a potentially disproportionate exposure to users who regularly lift the seat, as compared to users who merely touch the seat by sitting upon it. Women generally sit upon the seat, while men both sit on the seat as well as stand in front of the seat. As men lift the seat more often, men are much more likely to collect deposits onto their fingers.
An especially affected scenario is in the case of a cohabiting or married man and woman. A man living alone might regularly leave the seat up, perhaps to avoid urinating upon it, while a woman living alone is more likely to regularly leave the seat down. However, when a man and a woman cohabitate, the man is expected to lower the seat, to prevent the woman from falling into the toilet bowl, if she failed to notice that the seat was up before attempting to sit on the toilet.
This scenario is a common example of an environment in which users of the toilet are exposing themselves to a higher degree of risk with respect to waste causing disease propagation. The man would regularly find himself lifting and lowering the seat, and exposing him to touching the underside of the seat at every instance in which he decides to urinate standing up. If he leaves the seat up, then the woman must touch the seat in order to lower it. As a result, cohabitation means that the total number of times that at least one of the cohabiting persons is touching the deposits is higher than the case of the man and woman living apart from one another.
Therefore, there is a need to generally decrease the number of instances in which a user might touch any part of the toilet. There is an especially high need to provide such a solution which decreases the need to make contact with the toilet seat.